Comment by tossacct | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tossacct | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate your responses in this thread, I feel I have learned something from them. I want to make sure I am reading you correctly here:

>>>as long as the reduction [of Methodological Naturalism] remains provisional, it has tremendous explanatory power. In practice, it far too often becomes a de facto metaphysic, unwarranted and unproven within its own assumptions.

It seems like Karl Popper is saying something identical here: >>>"A naturalistic methodology (sometimes called an "inductive theory of science") has its value, no doubt.... I reject the naturalistic view: It is uncritical. Its upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe to have discovered a fact, they have only proposed a convention. Hence the convention is liable to turn into a dogma." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Karl_Po...

I will try to synthesize the two previous paragraphs here: "Methodological Naturalism assumes that what humans can observe is the only way to gain more knowledge about the observable AND unobservable world. It is helpful for addressing immediate concerns of the observable world. However, let's not pretend that its usefulness somehow makes it true. Predicting the FUTURE is difficult, so let's hedge our bets in case things start getting weird."

Do you agree that your statement and his are equivalent, or are there some differences? If there are no significant differences, is my statement a reasonable synthesis?

Popper seems to express my (and I'm assuming yours and his own) sentiment about naturalism with his concept of falsifiability, which science seems to have accepted. In my opinion that is science taking a very good thing from a modern philosopher.

Great question. Instead of trying to reconcile my weak prose with a giant like Popper, I'll instead try to summarize my understanding of him, taken mainly from my reading Objective Knowledge and Conjectures and Refutations. Let me know if this helps.

With Popper it's important to put things in context. He's reacting to the developments in Positivism/Verificationism and the rather famous problems it had. Falsification is related to Methodological Naturalism in that both are provisional hedges against unwarranted leaps within science, the problem of induction in particular (see: Hume and induction), as well as the historic difficulties in establishing the relationship between subject and object -- what I think in my mind and what I know about the world external to my mind (see: well, Hume and Kant).

Popper's view is that science is must be understood as merely conventional, not declarations of objective truth about the state of the world. So, falsification is a way of acknowledging this limitation while establishing a language for moving science forward within its appropriate boundaries. We no longer say a scientific theory is "verified," or even that one "believes" it to be true (Popper doesn't "believe in belief") -- this would imply a direct statement of truth about the world. Rather, we say we have a conjecture that has not been falsified. All of science, as "Objective Knowledge," is really the collection of language in books and articles and journals (what Popper calls "World Three") that contain the most useful conjectures that have been accepted by convention into the community, that have not been falsified.

This is why the idea of "falsifiability" is so important. If something has no criteria by which it can be shown to be false, then it cannot qualify as a candidate for citizenship in World 3.

This works as a provisional, conventional set of boundaries around science and useful guideposts that show the best kind of science as rooted in empirical experience and observation.

>Methodological Naturalism assumes that what humans can observe is the only way to gain more knowledge about the observable AND unobservable world. It is helpful for addressing immediate concerns of the observable world. However, let's not pretend that its usefulness somehow makes it true. Predicting the FUTURE is difficult, so let's hedge our bets in case things start getting weird

The Thomist Philosopher Edward Feser often uses the metaphor of a metal dectector when discussing Methodological Naturalism. It runs roughly like... (paraphrased and typed quickly on IE6 [yes kill me])

"Science acts on the assumption of methodological naturalism and that's okay. It's like a metal detector that only detects metal but dectects it with great accuracy. What is wrong is that many times the method is made into a metaphysic which is philosophically hard to maintain and which simply does not follow from the facts.

That a metal dectector has never detected wood is obvious because the metal detector isn't for detecting word. The Baconian project ignored teleological forces because, per Bacon, such teleology is hard to analyze within a scientific framework. Science has therefore focused on Material and Efficent causation. However, just because a method effectly locates material and efficent causes doesn't mean that other causes don't exist just as a metal dectector not detecting wood does not mean that wood does not exist. Therefore the argument for reductive materialism from the successful, that is treating methodological naturalism as the whole and complete story, is fundementally in error and incomplete."

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